15 July
2006 Chatmag Editorial.
The most recent
use of the 50,000 predators figure comes from the Pennsylvania Attorney
General, on the Pittsburgh
Tribune Review Web site.
Spokespersons
from the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
say they do not know where this figure comes from.
U.S. Attorney
General Gonzales also used this same figure in announcing “Project Safe
Childhood”. According to an article written by Jason McClure on Legaltimes.com
as to where the Attorney General found this figure:
“The AG’s press
secretary has the answer, though: “That number is actually pulled from
[NBC newsmagazine] ‘Dateline’ and other media outlets,” says Tasia Scolinos
via e-mail. Indeed, “Dateline” reporter Chris Hansen offered the statistic
last fall during one of the show’s popular hidden-camera stings of would-be
pedophiles, and other media outlets have since repeated it.
Hansen’s source,
according to the “Dateline” report: unnamed “law enforcement officials.”
Asked who those law enforcement officials were, Hansen told Legal Times
that “this is a number that was widely used in law enforcement circles,”
though he couldn’t specify by whom or where.”
Chris Hansen later
named former FBI agent Ken Lanning as the one that could confirm
that figure, but according to Lanning, he never used that figure and had
no idea where it came from.
No one knows how
many predators are using the Internet every day, no figures are kept, and
with the dynamically evolving Internet, there would be no way to quantify
such a number. Search IRC, which only lists Internet Relay Chat neworks,
shows on their home page the number of users in IRC at any given moment.
When I checked a few minutes ago, they estimated: "There are 903,918 people
in 579,210 chatrooms right now!" Search IRC does not know total number
of Internet chat users, Chatmag does not know, and certainly no Attorney
General or online safety organization knows.
Are there Internet
predators? Yes, too many, and Internet users should exercise caution in
chat channels, forums and social networking sites such as MySpace. IRC,
(Internet Relay Chat) for one is not a place for children. Chatmag lists
what we believe are good safe places for children to chat.
On 28 April 2006,
Chatmag News also published an article
regarding Yahoo! Chat being unusable for the general public.
To update the
article, we further state that Yahoo! chat should be avoided until Yahoo!
implements chat room moderators/operators. Yahoo! Chat is currently not
safe for anyone, child or adult.
Continued use
of the 50,000 figure only demonstrates the lack of knowledge regarding
the scourge of Internet predators. Proactive steps by law enforcement will
help stem the tide of Internet predators, not the citing of “goldilocks”
figures.
Peter J. Carr
Publisher
Chatmag.com
External Links:
Predator
Panic: Reality Check on Sex Offenders by Benjamin Radford.
PBS.org
Online Predators: Much Ado About… What Exactly?
Pittsburgh
Tribune Review. Online Predators.
SearchIRC.com
